Can You Engineer Civic Pride? Dubai Thinks So

A woman practices yoga in front of the Dubai skyline, with the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, seen from Creek Harbour on April 3, 2026. —Fadel Senna-AFP via Getty Images In the summer of 1987, I saw two men in a subway station force a third to crouch down to wipe his spit off the platform, while other commuters cheered them on.

The incident was remarkable, and has remained in my memory, for two reasons.

First, it was in Calcutta, a city synonymous with squalor.

Second, the two men were not officials responsible for enforcing cleanliness in public places but simply commuters, like the man they had taken to task.

Had he committed his offense on the street above the station, it would almost certainly have gone unnoticed: in much of urban India, expectorating in public places was, and remains, commonplace.

But the platforms and cars of Calcutta Metro, India’s first subway system, only a few years old at the time of this incident, were spanking clean—and among commuters, this aroused a sense of pride and responsibility.

Those two citizens were prepared to delay their own journey in order to keep the platform spotless.

I was reminded of that incident a couple of weeks ago, during a ride on the Dubai Metro.

On a blazing-hot Sunday morning, a group of six Hindi-speaking Indians was walking ahead of me toward a station, sipping sodas and eating ice cream.

One of the group, judging by the fact that she was pointing out the landmarks, was obviously a resident; the others were her guests, evidently visitors from back home.

When they arrived at the station, she stopped the group and asked them to drop their bottles and cups into the garbage bin.

Why, one of her visitors asked, sardonically, “Is there a fine? As it happens, there is a fine for littering in stations, and it would have been easy enough for her to say so.

But she said this: “Yeh fine ka sawal nahin, safai ka sawal hai.” (It is not a question of a fine but of cleanliness.) As a social scientist would tell you, both these incidents demonstrate the corollary of the Broken Window Theory .

The idea is usually cited in the context of criminology, but it applies more generally in urban studies.